Seeing the Forest for the Weeds: How Native Plants Can Save Our Failing Food System

Corn took thousands of years to develop and has an uncountable number of local varieties, but only a few are grown commercially.

One of the big questions we’re asked is why we’re working with wild plants instead of already domesticated plants, like every other agricultural research company in the world is. The short answer is that genetic diversity in our food is critical to human survival. Buckle up for the longer answer.

1: Because we’re the only ones who can do it.

Our proprietary native crops development process allows us to rapidly domesticate new species in a way that has never been possible before. This is why the National Science Foundation was so excited to fund our research. 

There are a few cases of successful modern domestication efforts: the wonderful folks at the Lands Institute in Kansas successfully domesticated and brought Kernza to market in recent years and it can now be found in bread, beer, and more. Blueberries are a billion dollar industry, and were domesticated in Maine between 1890 and 1916 by Elizabeth White. Jojoba oil was domesticated by a coalition of universities. Other historical examples took even longer - it took thousands of years for Native Americans to painstakingly domesticate crops like corn and tomatoes, a truly monumental feat.

Domestication has been rare because it’s hard and it’s slow. Using our patent-pending breeding process, we can condense that time to a few years. For high potential natives like Lupines where we can reference existing domesticated cousins, we can accelerate it even further.

2: because someone has to

Genetic diversity has drastically declined in our current food system. Of the 30,000 known species that can provide food, only 174 are grown commercially around the world.  This concentration dramatically limits our society’s ability to adapt as the climate changes, because all 174 of those crops are adapted to the climates we used to have. 3 of them (wheat, rice, and corn) contribute more than half the calories consumed by humans and a fourth (soy) is 3/4 of plant based protein consumed by humans and animals alike.

That’s a real problem.

Based on the latest peer reviewed science, around half of global farm lands will be unsuitable for many current crops at 2 degrees of warming.  We’re already past 1.5 degrees, and not slowing down.

The business model of giant corporations selling seed to farmers instead of farmers saving their own seed has further reduced diversity in a process known as genetic erosion. Genetic engineering where whole regions grow genetically identical crops utterly destroys it.

Thanks to genetic erosion, those conventional crops have lost between 75% and 93% of their internal genetic diversity in the last century.

Some existing crops will adapt, a few may even thrive, but many will be unable to adapt. Unfortunately the available genetic diversity that might have allowed them to adapt is mostly gone. This is a catastrophe.

I did a learning session for the Nature Tech Collective recently, and included a case study on US wheat production as an example of this. A century ago there were a hundred varieties of wheat grown in the US; now there are 6. While standardization has allowed large companies to easily sell a product with consistent flavor across large markets, it has destroyed the genetic diversity that modern breeders have to work with. 

This process has played out in almost every commercial crop - and is one of the reasons why Bayer and other companies that use genetic engineering have bought up the rights to virtually all the “heritage” varieties of common agricultural plants that are commercially available: the adaptations in the genes of those varieties are their toolbox to create new GMO crops. And that toolbox is shrinking.

3: Because diversity is everywhere if we open our eyes

Even with all the heirlooms the big ag corporations have bought up, there are hard limits on the genetic diversity available in conventional crops. All soy is a single species. 95% of cultivated wheat is a single species. All corn is a single species, all domesticated rice grown in the world is one of two species, all commercially grown wild rice is one of 4 species, and the list goes on.

For comparison, there are 25 species of native wild rice within California alone - and they’re adapted to a much wider range of climates. With time and breeding, most or all of those could produce commercially viable varieties that dramatically expand the resilience of our food system, while - equally importantly - providing habitat and avoiding the harm to ecosystems from conventional farming.

By developing our proprietary process for rapid domestication, we've changed the rules of the game for earth's largest industry. Our technology and approach are critical to human survival, because modern crops are failing fast. While Cargill and Bayer are struggling to genetically engineer climate-adapted soy from a tiny number of ancestral lineages, we have 120 species of wild lupines in California alone.

It’s not just private industry with this blind spot - in 2023, the Canadian government dumped $73M into adapting domesticated European lupine species to Canada, and failed - ignoring the wild lupines growing all across North America. We’re taking the opposite approach, and have started with native wild lupines that are already adapted to grow here.

4: Because diversification is one of the most powerful risk management strategies

A mutual fund manager who had half the funds money in 3 businesses would be fired for negligence, but that’s exactly where the entire world has ended up with food. Climate change is complex, even the most sophisticated projections have margins of error. For centuries, western leaders have foolishly believed that it was possible to dominate and reshape nature. In fact, the “failure” to do so is one of the often-repeated justifications for the genocide and dispossession of Native Americans and indigenous people everywhere.

But natural systems are far more complex than colonizers realized. We see that firsthand in California as salmon face extinction, aquifers collapse, and forests burn - while 80% of our water is used to irrigate non-native crops that are not adapted to grow here, most of which are exported.

At the same time, many California-native species have adapted to thrive where existing domesticated crops cannot, and have evolved robust heat, drought and salt tolerance mechanisms not found or less effective in conventional crops. As the climate changes, these adaptations can play a critical role.

Everywhere humans are, there are local native species that fed their ancestors for millennia. Our radical idea is simple - improve what already exists and is locally adapted. Instead of turning the world into one vast monoculture, we want a resilient radically diversified web of local foods, each adapted to local climates and with a wealth of internal genetic diversity that allows them to continue thriving even as the world changes.

Where every other agricultural research company in the world saw weeds, we’ve found the future.